After reading the explanation from Brian, it seems to me that there are two ends to the Roon pipeline that create choke points, and there are potentially other things along the way that can cause choke points as well.
Starting with the two ends, there are requirements of the core at one end, and it seems the equipment used to power the Roon apps at the other end. The Roon apps are what displays the graphics and images so we can interact with Roon. While it seems that the core gets a lot of attention, the device powering the app should be given more attention, as well as what comes between both ends.
I have been concerned with my Core lately thinking that is the source of my slow performance along with the fact that my core runs on an Atom processor in a Synology NAS. But Iām not so sure this is the main issue. Iāve done different things to isolate my issues, and have found that the Roon app runs very well on my somewhat old 9.7 inch iPad Pro, but on my new iMac Mini with a six core i7 processor, it sometimes takes too long for my large playlists to load, to add new albums, and to change tracks, etc. On my ancient iPhone 7, it can be painful waiting for things to load. Because of this variation in performance from app to app, I am not sure the core is the sole problem, and it is interesting to me that my most powerful device is not the best performing device.
Other choke points in the pipeline could be my wifi but my I constantly test and optimize the wifi throughout my house. When I run Roon on my iPad app, it is right next to the iMac so the wifi they are getting is the same. Additionally, there are times Roon runs reasonably well on all my devices, even my iPhone. Then other times it does not. My best guess is since I integrate with TIDAL, the choke point might be the service that provides the bulk of my music. Or perhaps Roon canāt always pick up SongKick info and that causes an issue? It seems there are things that can cause poor performance that have nothing to do with the core or the app at all.
As a side note, someone will need to explain to me why graphics performance is so important. Most of what Roon displays is text, and album cover artwork which is fine as a 3-5MB jpeg image. My understanding is this is fairly low demand graphics. You donāt need 4k and you are not doing complex image editing like youād do in Photoshop or if I was gaming. I agree that Roon should run well on integrated graphics. Iām not sure why this kind of program would need a discrete graphics card.
It does seem important to have a solid core. There, I understand how Roon needs the power to pull in all the data from the various sources to create that beautifully organized graphic display. But as I mentioned, the experience for me indicates that on an iPad, my core seems to run great on an Atom processor, but on other devices it does not. At times it is great everywhere, other times is sucks everywhere. Is something else going on?
This is important to me because I want to improve performance so Roon runs great on all my apps. At the same time I donāt want to spend money needlessly looking to solve issues that donāt exist. Perfection is a noble thing to chase but it has some frustrations. This quest has me feeling like Don Quixote. It seems that a fuller explanation with a better paradigm would be helpful. Roon could also deploy a diagnostic tool, similar to the signal path window, that would help isolate various performance issues along the entire pipeline such as Wifi, TIDAL, Qobuz the core, or the app.